Art can speak to anyone, regardless of the distance between the work's content, its creator's experiences, and its purpose—whether intentional or seemingly obvious—vis-à-vis the audience. *Reading Lolita in Tehran* deals precisely with this, as well as the personal experiences of its protagonist: an English literature professor who returned to Iran in the midst of the 1979 revolution, harboring high hopes and the promise of a fulfilling career and life. Over the course of some two decades, the professor comes to realize that—at least regarding the former—achieving this might not be possible in that place.
Director Eran Riklis’s film is an adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s memoir; the screenplay, written by Marjorie David, retains the book’s central premise: examining the author’s experiences and discoveries through the lens of various literary works. One of these is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial *Lolita*, which leads the film’s Azar—played by Golshifteh Farahani, an Iranian expatriate like her character—to focus on the novel’s eponymous protagonist.
Director: Eran Riklis
Writers: Marjorie David, Eran Riklis, Azar Nafisi
Stars: Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mina Kavani
In the book, that character’s existence is perceived through the distorted vision of a predatory, controlling narrator. Consequently, Azar—who at that point in her story is secretly running a book club with her most curious and promising students—draws a parallel between the narrator and the society, culture, and government of her native country, asserting that these forces compel all girls and women in Iran to be exactly like Lolita.
While it is certainly a biographical film, the story focuses not on the events of a person's life, but on ideas. Specifically, it focuses on the ideas that emerge when analyzing a literary work on its own terms and applying them to a context relevant to the reader's life and experiences, as well as to their deepest fears and hopes. That is the function of art and what a great teacher can achieve.
Thus, the film’s plot is driven as much by these ideas as by the basic narrative of the protagonist’s time in Tehran. She and her husband Bijan (Arash Marandi)—a civil engineer who also sees his own career flourish in this time and place—arrive in Iran, where Azar secures a teaching position at a local university. This part of the story centers on her classes on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s *The Great Gatsby*—a work that takes on particular significance given Iran’s political climate, especially regarding the novel’s cynical view of American excess and related themes.
However, teaching the work becomes complicated when a small but vocal group of students categorically rejects the book because it depicts an extramarital affair. This campaign is led by a student named Bahri (Reza Diako), who eventually suggests that the professor put the novel on trial. Notably, while Bahri presents himself as a religious fundamentalist, he shows a willingness to have his views challenged.
Such openness is not the norm in the rest of Azar’s experiences; the film chronicles her life by alternating between two periods: her work as an official professor during her early years in Tehran and her clandestine activities after losing her university post. During this time, she witnesses several of her female students being detained, tortured, and even executed by the government, while she herself risks academic sanctions—or far worse consequences—by refusing to cover her hair in public following the passage of a law mandating it.
Over time, it becomes clear that teaching a work like Henry James’s *Daisy Miller*—featuring an independent-minded woman, like the novella’s title character—is virtually impossible. After all, the bookstore where Azar and her closest friend—a fellow academic nicknamed "the Magician" (Shahbaz Noshir)—used to buy books for their private collections has been shut down and boarded up due to government censorship. When the time comes to teach *Lolita* in her own apartment, Azar is forced to photocopy pages from her personal copy so that her students can complete the assigned reading.
While the story is intrinsically about oppression and the terrible consequences of such a pervasive system, it also addresses how art—and those who appreciate, reflect upon, and seek to discover it—will somehow endure in the face of such forces. In other words, the film possesses an inherent optimism that permeates the narrative without being naive (reading and discussing literature does not solve the students' real-life problems, and Azar suffers from nightmares even in the epilogue, where history strangely repeats itself). Azar is too intelligent, and Farahani’s portrayal of the system's impact on the character is too precise, for us to view the protagonist as someone who is in denial of reality or using literature merely as an escape.
Yet, reading can teach us about ourselves, regardless of where, when, or under what conditions we encounter something of value (in the final reading class, for instance, Azar compares the society of Jane Austen’s time—with its rigid structures and traditions—to contemporary Iran, while noting how even small things can be acts of rebellion). *Reading Lolita in Tehran* is a film about that fundamental truth of art, told with profound reflection.
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